Priceline share price projected in May of 2000 by
Jamie Kiggen, then of DLJ: $190 US

Priceline share price on October 17, 2000: $5
US

Sources:

1-4: Evans Data Corporation (September 26,
2000)

5-8: BowlingAlone.com

9: Wired, quoting Forester
Research

10: Zelerate

11-13: Venture Economics

14: San Jose Mercury News,
quoting Venture Economics

15-20: CBS.MarketWatch.com

THEY SAID IT

The work of thought is one of the most ancient and useful
activities of humankind. To generate thought is to create life,
liveliness, community. Consensus isn't important. What's important
is how the generative power of our thought makes life vivid and
burns out the dead brush, dead thoughts, dead institutions.

—Michael Ventura

Genius is applying the originality of youth to the experience
of maturity.

—Michael Polanyi

Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very
good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.

—Dick Brandon

Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the costs
become prohibitive.

—William Buckley Jr.

Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense
that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been
born.

—Neal Stephenson

Believe it or not, the Internet is actually under-hyped...We
are coconspirators in the largest, legal creation of new wealth,
primarily in Internet companies.

We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of
thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. But to
me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is
the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.

—Steve Jobs

The corporation as we know it, which is now 120 years old, is
unlikely to survive the next 25 years. Legally and financially yes,
but not structurally and economically.

—Peter Drucker

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too
high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

—Michelangelo

STOP THE PRESSES: OPEN SALES BECOMES
ZELLERATE

Once again we're writing about something before it's
happened, for publication afterward. Dig this: where I am, it's
still October, the windows are wide open on the 26th floor above
West 56th in Manhattan, and the leaves on the trees in Central Park
are just starting to turn color. Where you are, every one of those
leaves is mulch and Open Sales has long since
morphed into Zelerate.

Which is what really matters, for this story. The leaves fall
every year. Open Sales can shed its name but
once.

It makes sense, of course. Open Sales
was founded by two unrelated guys named Ferber (Coincidence? Yes).
And a quick check of Google (whose collection of umpty-thousand
Linux machines has intimate knowledge of 1,247,340,000 web pages)
discloses some persuasive statistics:

open = 31,000,000

sales = 18,100,000

open sales = 801,000

“open sales” = 5,180

zelerate = 0

In other words, Open Sales was a good
example of applied generics. You couldn't ask for better camouflage
if your name ended with “Solutions”.

So what's with Zelerate?

Paul Carlstrom, the company's director of corporate
communications, says this: “Rob and Glenn (Ferber)...cofounded
Open Sales to offer open-source e-commerce
applications in 1998. A lot has occurred since that time: The GPL'd
software has caught the attention of a growing cadre of developers.
The product has matured rapidly. The installed base of
Open Sales AllCommerce has risen...”

Soon, the company found itself doing “accelerated commerce
solutions”. And, “because we feel you can't get from (a) to (z)
without knowing where (z) is located, we've chosen the last letter
of the alphabet to start our name.”

Carlstrom also wants us to know that open source is what
primarily accounts for development speed—for two reasons.

One is that “we have expanded the open-source model to
include customer-mandated direction as part of our development
process.”

The other is that Zelerate isn't a product company. it sells
service. With enterprise-class applications, he explains,
“e-commerce packages can cost in the hundreds of thousands of
dollars, and the customer will still end up paying more for
services and support than for the original licensing fees.” By not
making development secretive, Zelerate allows constant customer
input to the development process.

There is a common belief that service companies can't grow
(or, to use last year's word, scale) as
fast—or as large—as product companies. This may not be a bad
thing in any case, but Zelerate is now named to test the
theory.